This year has been a rather interesting one for the anime fandom. We have seen the merger of Crunchyroll and Funimation, Netflix doubling down on their acquisition of anime and even Amazon getting in on the anime TV business (to varying degrees of success) These changes have led to the easy legal access of nearly all the currently ongoing anime TV shows in the west. It also didn’t hurt that the anime movies released in the past few years have been smash hits that have had small but successful cinema runs in many countries worldwide. So, with easy access to a formerly niche medium comes the inevitable new and curious consumers. This is a great thing, in the past, people curious about anime had to either go to special events to see it or trade bootleg VHS tapes. For someone like me who lives in a 3rd world country with horrendous internet speeds and exorbitant data prices, anime was something that only the truly dedicated consumers actively pursued. Region locking still doesn’t help, but that’s slowly getting better over time.

The difficult barriers that anime consumers of old had to go through in order to have access as well as the generally negative stereotype that the nerd culture garnered led to most fans huddling into their little corner and enjoying it in their own safe space. IRC chat channels, internet forums, social media and anime conventions were the places that anime fans could come together to enjoy and celebrate their medium of choice. It was wonderful, it was fun and it was attractive, naturally these new subcultures formed from these communities such as cosplaying and even blogging led new consumers to the medium.

Short history lesson over, lets fast forward to the present day where legal anime is either a theatre away or a simple click away and the attitude towards new consumers can sometimes be…. undesirable. The need to test new anime fans in order to allow them or to validate them as ‘legitimate’ is something that I have seen permeate various nerd culture communities over the years. Most notably gaming, we are all aware of the ‘gamer girl’ label which thankfully over time has been eradicated. These days we have to deal with the ‘casual gamer’ label which quite honestly is ridiculous and does nothing for the medium or the community.

Gatekeeping came into the spotlight very recently when Black Panther star Micheal B Jordan highlighted his interest in the medium, ofcourse a bunch of internet trolls and gatekeepers had to ‘test’ his legitimacy. Another example would be how a few days ago Kim K West tweeted about her interest in the medium as well, that garnered the same gatekeeping reaction.To an extent, I understand where some of these fans are coming from but that doesn’t justify it and its quite honestly wrong and doesn’t do the community any good at all. We have seen this have detrimental effects before for example the Fighting Game Community has had this problem for a while now. If one doesn’t know what an ‘FADC’ is then why are they even trying to participate? The FGC has garnered a reputation as being for elitists only and unwelcoming to newcomers when this is far from the truth. The vocal rotten eggs have partially ruined the image of this thriving community.

These days most of the events I help organise are both meant to celebrate the deeper intricacies of our weird nerdy fandom but also to introduce curious newcomers as well. The success of Super Hero movies should be a shining example of how successfully accommodating newbies and normies into our world can only be better for everyone. Its now totally normal to say you’re a fan of Thor and there is a good chance most people will have an idea of what you’re talking about. Wouldn’t it be great if that was the case with anime too?

At the end of the day whether willingly or not, our little subcultures are not so little anymore and thats a great thing because it means we can get to see more of it legally and more often. I also feel its nice to know that a few years from now anime might be incorporated into the mainstream popular culture enough for it not to be ‘weird’ anymore. The content wont suffer or change infact I think it will get better and more diverse if Devilman Crybaby, Violet Evergarden and Girls Last Tour are anything to go by.

Just a short list of games and anime I truly enjoyed and left an impact on me.

Kinos Journey

Im thankful for Kinos Journey because it provided a platform for anime fans to discuss and debate various social-political thought experiments. The 2017 remake may not have been as well received as the original anime but atleast it brought a cult classic to the foreground.

Yakuza 0

I had flirted with the idea of getting into the Yakuza franchise for years, being a fan of Shenmue and enjoying the phenomenal Sleeping Dogs just made me salivate at the prospect of being a Yakuza. Im thankful for the fact that Yakuza 0 has an amazing narrative and brilliant characters, Im thankful for the time I finally got the better of Mr Shakedown as well.

This is the 3rd draft of this article, because it initially started as a guide for what shows and movies would be good for people new to anime. I decided to change my approach because A: there are many other places you can get that information and B: the titles on that list are not as varied as I would like. A more interesting approach I gathered, would be to discuss and bring up the shows that I consider are destined to be modern classics.Why? because I believe it will be an interesting thought experiment, what opinions will the veteran anime fans have on the topic and what do they consider classics and why, also are the shows that I bring up accessible to newer viewers? will people who are not necessarily eclectic in taste have a go at these shows and what do they consider classics? I find it all so very intriguing.

So, what is my definition of a ‘classic show?’ This is a show that I believe is first and foremost exceptional in its quality i.e if I were to rate it on my review scale (check my scale to understand how I rate) it would most likely be a 9 or 10. A ‘classic’ is a show that has a cascading effect on the anime industry, take for example Neon Genesis Evangelion and all the mimics it had. A ‘classic’ is a show that the community will remember and continue to remember in high regard constantly calling back to it for numerous reasons.

Hello readers, welcome to my second post for this years 12 days of anime project. Today I want to talk about a topic that has been dear to me ever since I became an anime fan, how ‘mainstream’ has anime become in 2017?

ANIME STREAMING

I wrote an article just over 5 years ago about the shows and movies that the anime industry used to appeal to the west and to join hands with them. The points I raised back then are mostly still valid today but boy oh boy things have dramatically shifted within these 5 years. For starters we now have almost 100% legal streaming (in America atleast) for all the new ongoing anime shows. Crunchyroll, Funimation, Netflix, Hulu and even Anime Strike AMAZON of all companies are out here combating for our well earned money and viewership. In todays TV stream and binge culture its become a lot easier and LEGAL to find and watch brand new anime almost anywhere on the internet. The monetary juggernauts that are Amazon and Netflix may have proven difficult for FUNi and Crunchy to compete so they did the reasonable thing and joined forces… oh and Sony bought FUNimation. Sony have dabbled in anime over the years publishing a few movies most notably Satoshi Kon films. Continue reading ’12 Days Of Anime Day 9: How The Mainstream Embraced Anime’

Hey readers, So I realise this is my first post in a long while and for the longest time I’ve had many excuses for that ranging from time constraints due to work and school, insane internet costs (they are still insane) and the good old writers block. None of which are completely true, the real reason I couldn’t find the energy to talk about the anime I loved here was because I finally hit total anime burnout sometime last year.

So Anime Burnout what exactly is it? I feel like Gigguk recent video life-cycle of an anime fan video explains it pretty well. This the point at which almost all anime doesn’t seem appealing anymore. One of the main causes of anime burnout is the constant search for the next great anime and the disappointment it provides just gets exhausting and you just give up entirely. 2016 was truly not a great year for anime (for me specifically) its a year in which I couldn’t even come up with my yearly top 12 listicle, my favourite anime thing that year was Shelter! Continue reading ’12 Days Of Anime Day 10: My Struggle With Anime Burnout’

I haven’t written one of these in a long while but the time felt right mostly because of the occasion and because I feel the break did me some good. The occasion ofcourse being E3 which has consistently been getting better and bigger over the years, much like my passion for the gaming and nerd culture industry as a whole. This years E3 promised brand new hardware and a variety of games like never before. For the first time console gamers have options similar to PC gamers regarding their specifications and control options, the Switch would be having its first E3 presentation but for some reason the expectations and hype seemed a tad more tempered than usual. None the less I feel like E3 delivered and left us with a bunch of games and hardware to look out for and here are my personal picks and some that I figure you should look out for as well in the near future. Lets start with the ones we expected; Continue reading ‘Games To Look Out For From E3 2017’

2015 was actually a very good year for varied kinds of anime, we got all sorts of genres consistently throughout the year. We even got a major smash hit the likes of Attack on Titan in One Punch Man. The following list is comprised of anime I saw to completion and actually enjoyed a whole tonne, if a show is not on the list then I probably dropped it or didn’t watch it. Continue reading ‘The Kidds Top 12 Anime of 2015’